I just recently started using a solar charger to charge a 10k mah battery pack that I use to charge my phone every night. One device “off the grid.”
Short of installing solar on my home I’d really love to be able to charge a large battery that would output 120V so I could use household appliances “off the grid.”
Does anybody have some other energy hacks, or ways to reduce your energy consumption at home that’s not just “use less energy?”
Insulation. Reflectrix your attic. Seal off air gaps. Add as much blow-in that you can.
Heat pump water heater.
You can buy an entry Ecoflow River that will use solar before battery. Could run a fridge off of it.
Next time you look for a laptop, make sure its got usb-c powerdelivery, i can charge mine from a 50w-solarpanel + Usb-Controller + Powerbank, currently limited by the Controller to 18w (12v, 1.5a~), but that would be another device off the Grid. other than that: look into Kitchen stuff, my Fridge uses Alot of energy (if its ancient, maybe calculate how much it uses (KWh per Year / Powerbill ), and consider how long the savings would take, to buy a new one ). Same with the Cooking-Stove, i am looking to buy Insolatet Pans currently.
Thanks! Yeah I use one laptop I can charge usb-c and another I can’t. Didn’t think about doing it with a laptop. I’ll need a bigger battery.
Getting more efficient appliances would be nice but they’re so expensive.
Make your own solar system? Il built my first one out of 7 or 8 second hand panels, old truck batterys and eBay inverters, I can’t find any photos, but it was enough to a fridge, tv, charge phones and lights
Would not help here, we get like zero sun for half the year, and surrounded by trees otherwise. I haven’t seen the sun for more than a couple of hours in weeks.
I was told the old batteries aren’t trustworthy when I was going to salvage some from cars getting junked out, but you can get them to work still?
That’s cool! How much did that cost and where and when?
Umm around 2022ish, the solar panels were free from the tip, the batteries were also free form a mine site(collapsed cells could hold 12v but couldn’t crank out high amps), solar controlers were from eBay 150 bucks or something and a 5000w inverter was 600ish from memory also probably about 200 bucks worth of battery cable and connectors,
Anker solix battery and some solar panels to charge it, you could do most of your house off that. Not sure which brand is best to go with but that at least let’s you look up some example products. That gives you a plug and play type of setup for the solar/battery system but it will may cost more than building your own.
How would you reduce energy consumption without using less energy? Not sure if this counts as obviously it is using less energy… Either way, turn the heating down for the house, even more in rooms you don’t use often. Then get a heated blanket or hot water bottle to warm your self up.
Firewood might be a cheap energy source to look at. Heat a bunch of water (or any large mass) with a short clean high temp fire and then let the water keep an area warm for a long time. Like a giant water bottle really, you could pump it through a radiator depending on the scale you want. You can heat yourself or an entire house like this if you want to but that depends on your DIY skills or what quality of workmanship you see as acceptable.
You can get easy to use plastic pipes and quick attach fittings that are very easy to use your self at home. Check their temp limit, 60c seems like a common maximum so I would heat up a water barrel that can take that or more and use a thermometer to check it’s not going over the limit for the pipes. If you go copper them you can go until it starts to boil.
Thanks for the recommendations! The silica is a little out of my budget but definitely more affordable than installing solar for your house.
That heating idea sounds cool, but I can’t DIY something like that anytime soon. Also sounds high maintenance and risky. Where I’m at most energy consumption goes towards cooling instead of heating. Any cooling tips?
You can try a swamp cooler, which works best when it’s not as humid, put a beach towel or blanket over an open windown with it’s end in a pot of water, so the water soaks up through it. The evaporation produces a cooling effect. Try to put one in a window the air is coming into.
Hm that sounds interesting. I’ll give it a try. Thanks!
Never gets hot enough to need more than a fan here really, but similar ideas should still apply. Cool the person instead of the house. So I’ve bottle or a small heat pump (old fridge, aquarium chiller) to cool water and pipe it around you in some way.
Downside is condensation, but not sure how bad that is if you have low humidity as we are always high humidity.
Create shade wherever the sun shines, on the outside before the sun even hits the house. Focus especially on shading the glass and metall parts of your house. Make it angled and with some distance from the house so it still allows air flow. Mesh will shade less but allow more airflow and tarp will block pretty much all wind byt also pretty much all sun, so experiment with the tradeoff for different parts of the house like near windows or over the roof.
Where I live that’s enough to keep me reasonably, so thats all I know. Probably need to learn more with the more extreme weather we have now.
use compost to make biogas, use biogas to drive a heat engine generator.
Hm tell me more? How dangerous this to produce/handle?
In rural china their farms traditionally have one, like a tank they route sewage and scraps and whatever, and they pipe off the gasses for cooking and heating and such, as it produces methane and the like.
you can use an anaerobic digestion system to generate about 100 liters of gas a day, given that you feed it around a liter of 50/50 food scraps and water slurry. you can heat a stirling engine with it to generate 2-300W or so.
it’s not risk free of course, biogas is explosive, but taking precautions can minimize it. produce and store outside, under low pressure, limit the volume, and use filters and flame arrestors.
this video is a good intro to the subject.
another interesting avenue if you have access to cheap wood is syngas. you can run clean syngas in a unmodified internal combustion engine, so the generator part is easy. clean gasification is the hard part, since you need to get rid of the tar and water content. using charcoal is the best method because all that gunk is already burned off. you put it in an airtight container with an inlet and an outlet, light it at the inlet, and pump in a controlled amount of air. the charcoal then goes through a redox reaction and produces syngas at the outlet.
a syngas generator can produce roughly 10x the energy of a biogas plant of the same size, but involves high temperatures and more preprocessing.
lastly, what’s more important to you? lowering your bills or being energy independent? my housing co-op has a deal with a local electricity company where they installed a load-following battery bank in our basement. it tracks the energy market so it can charge at night, be used by us during the day, and sell the surplus to the grid. it has lowered our energy bills by about a third. a lot less messy than the other two solutions, but also a lot less independent. doesn’t really matter for our situation, since we’re on district heating as well, but your situation may be different.
I was about to rant about you handing advices carelessly without talking about a proper setup and filters. Thanks!
there’s only so much you can fit in an elevator pitch :P
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You seem like you’re lost. And/or a bot.
